By John Brice
Special Contributor
When it had ended, after pedigrees and styles had clashed 40 minutes like a pickup truck on a drag strip, Lauren Ebo gathered herself at midcourt inside Purcell Pavilion before she fulfilled myriad post-game media obligations.
There, Notre Dame’s super-senior post – a 6-foot, 4-inch embodiment of smiling determination – was greeted by Olivia Miles, her 5-10 teammate who’s been relegated, four games and counting, to emotional-support peer-coach.
All Ebo had done was set a new Fighting Irish postseason standard of rebounding excellence, 18 battered boards, and contributed 10 points as third-seeded Notre Dame, shorthanded in its backcourt, nonetheless punched its second-straight Sweet 16 berth under coach Niele Ivey and the 19th of the program’s history.
“Obviously, our team is so close, so we were just joking around, just messing around,” Ebo said of her embrace with Miles, the All-America point guard slated for surgery to repair a leg injury. “I love Liv, and I love our team. Yeah, it was just banter.”
Via a 53-48 triumph in front of a raucous crowd of 4,565, the program’s 27th victory this season, Notre Dame had earned its right to celebrate.
Despite the absences of Miles and Dara Mabrey, stalwarts of their backcourt, to season-ending injuries inside the season’s final six weeks, the Fighting Irish adapted. They bludgeoned State on the boards with an 49-32 edge that translated into a 30-18 advantage for points in the paint.
They blunted No. 11-seed Mississippi State’s pugnacious ball-pressure defense with a variety of players – KK Bransford, Sonia Citron, Cassandre Prosper among them – doing whatever it took to help get the Irish into some semblance of an offensive flow.
Nothing was easy, but then again, nothing is supposed to be easy when surviving to stand alongside just 15 other programs with national championship aspirations is on the line.
Notre Dame’s close to this game – separating from ties of 41-all and 43-all with a 10-5 finishing spurt – mirrored the team’s season-long resiliency, the grit that had fueled the program to the Atlantic Coast Conference’s regular-season championship.
“I had to call a timeout,” said Ivey, with a pair of Sweet 16s in her first three seasons at the helm, “and I told them to breathe and relax. They went on their run, and — check — they banged a couple threes. I felt like we were starting to lose our composure. We didn’t get organized within the offense, not taking great shots and not getting offensive rebounds, and so I just talked to them about, keep our poise.
“We knew that they were going to go on a run. So now we have to withstand the run. There’s a little bit of adversity, and they just kind of locked in, and now we’ve got a chance to really execute.”
The Irish’s close to this game was superior in its execution; the last of the game’s five ties broken by Bransford’s free throws and Citron’s athletic, darting jumper for an 47-43 edge.
This after Ebo corralled a loose ball, worked baseline and kissed a bucket off the glass. Though it only temporarily broke the stalemate, it was a bucket that signified this Irish squad would not wilt.
“Obviously we missed a couple shots, but Ebo got that one offensive rebound and put that basket back in, and that crowd erupted so we really needed a basket to settle us in,” Ivey said. “I just thought with their run, the energy, I needed to just settle them in, and I just talked about having composure and keeping — staying poised within their run.”
Though it had struggled from the floor throughout the contest, Notre Dame flashed its greatest poise in the game’s closing stretch – especially from the charity stripe.
After missing 10 of their first 21 free throws, the Irish closed the game by converting eight of their 10 attempts.
Citron made 10 tries, including her final four, and Ebo for the game hit four of her five tries from the line.
“I talked about, ‘It’s game-time,’” Ivey said. “[I told them] that we have a couple minutes to get to the Sweet 16, and we need every basket, we need you guys to step up and have confidence, and again, be mentally prepared to step up and make a free throw. Free throws are mental, and it’s something that we do all the time, something that they do off the court, on their own.
“Big-time players step up and make big-time plays, and that’s what Sonia did. She struggled a lot, but she ended up with 10 out of 14 but she made the last four which were big, and big-time players step up in those moments. It’s a mental thing and they sealed the game which was huge.”
Everything gets larger from this point onward. Up next for Notre Dame is a rematch with Maryland, which upended the Irish, 74-72, in December as part of the ACC/Big 12 Challenge.
Experience, injuries, maturity make this a different Notre Dame team; likewise, Maryland is a different iteration from the squad that turned a four-point, fourth-quarter deficit into a shocking win against the Irish.
Ivey knows the pulse of her team.
“I’m really proud of the effort. I’m really proud of the toughness and the resilience,” she said. “It takes a lot of confidence and a lot of belief to be able to do what we’re doing right now. I have a lot of players that are in different roles, somebody to run the point as you guys all know with the storyline, and that’s very hard, very challenging, and it’s my job to make sure that they are confident, they believe, and that we are over-prepared. It’s very strategic at this point.
“And again, it’s a credit to the toughness and the grit of this group. They want to keep playing. They want to keep dancing, and they did that today by showing up and going all the way — leaving it all on the floor and I’m just so proud as a coach.”
They are all contributing to this Notre Dame run, healthy and injured players alike.